Oooooo I'm jealous... And cold.

I just got done reading Marc's blog a few minutes ago, he's on a cruise to Mexico. Lucky dog, he was talking about how hot it was and I'm sitting here in my winter jammies with my robe on and I'm still freezing. Yes, I'm so jealous... Last time I checked the weather it was 43 with a wind chill of 35, and it was raining. Lovely. Nothing like the damp cold that seeps into your bones and you just can't get warm. I'm glad he's having a good time though, he works hard and he deserves a vacation and a lot of R&R.

I shouldn't really be complaining about our weather, just about 100 miles west of here they're in a blizzard warning with show and very high winds. See, there's always someone who is worse off than you are! I'll be glad this is just rain and it's not ice or snow!

Time Out For Women is this weekend and I'm so excited! There's never anything exciting (church-wise) here in Omaha. You think we'd have something once in awhile because this is Winter Quarters, but you'd be wrong! We don't even have a Deseret Book here, or a DI, or a distribution center... We do have the Temple, and I'm grateful for that, but really we're just off in no man's land as far as the church sees us! Anyway, Lori Jorgenson and I are going to go together, so that should be a lot of fun, I'm pretty excited about it. There's a 3 hour meeting on Friday night and then all day on Saturday. I have to leave early on Saturday though, we're also supposed to go to a wedding on Saturday in Fremont. A friend of mine has a daughter who is getting married, so I told her we'd make the reception even if we couldn't make the wedding. Hey, I waited a long time for this TOFW and I'm not going to miss the whole darn day!

I'm loving working the hours I have now - 7 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., but I don't like being the only person working at night. This week is kind of long, the lady who works 4:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. is on vacation and this is my week to be on call, so I'm on call every morning until either 6 or 7:30, depending on what time the next person starts working. I'm afraid to go to sleep, I'm sure the hospital is going to call looking for a report as soon as I close my eyes. I'm not liking that at all!

Buttercup gave us a little scare this week. As you may or may not know, dachshunds are notorious for having their backs go out on them. We lost our first dachshund, Schnapps, when his back when out and the steroids they gave him to help him actually caused multi-system organ failure. He also had seizures and was battling an autoimmune disease, but still, it was hard losing him.... Anyway, Buttercups has had problems with her neck in the past and this week - I think because of the rain and cold - her neck was bothering her again. Monday night we started with the prednisone and while she was laying beside me as I worked I kept the heating pad on her. She's feeling much better today. Poor baby. She can walk okay when she's having problems, but you can tell it's painful - and she absolutely can't do stairs at all. So when it's time to go out either Steve or I has to carry her all the way out into the yard since we have 3 steps off our back porch. Heck, sometimes I can't get down the stairs myself without using the handrail, so it's a challenge for both me and Buttercup when she needs to go out. I'm happy to say the prednisone seems to have done the trick. Tonight I let her out and she flew out the door and down the stairs before I could even lean over to pick her up! Whew! Every time that happens I'm scared she won't pull out of it. She's 8 years old now, 2 years older than Schnapps was when we had to put him down, so it's kind of scary.

I got to see Vince yesterday! He's just the cutest little guy around! He's had some diarrhea and can't go to day care. It wasn't so bad (thank goodness!) while he was here. He's so happy all the time anyway. The only thing he was upset about was that he had to stay in his playpen/travel crib while he was here. I trust my dogs with him, but he is the weakest of the pack (dog mentality here) and I sure don't want to take the chance that one of the dogs would nip him. Vince was okay after my new Crocs came (no thanks to FedEx - those morons....) and he got to play with the box the water Crocs came in. He would hide a toy inside and then we'd open it to find the toy - what a surprise! He was laughing out loud and we had a blast. To be truthful, Amber came and got him way too soon, I could have spent more time playing. Unfortunately I only had 5 hours of sleep that night, so I was a little tired... Maybe another day soon. Of course I took pictures, I just haven't downloaded them yet!

I guess that's it for now. I'm going to head off to bed and see if I can't get some sleep. Later!